The Waking

In the blog I wrote on 7th February 2023, ‘What can happen when you meditate,’ I made a brief mention of the altered states of consciousness that are known in some branches of Buddhism and Hinduism by the Pali word, ‘jhanas’, or ‘dhyanas’ in Sanskrit. As these have sometimes been considered as steps towards awakening I thought they were worth more emphasis here.  As you can imagine, a meditation practice that has been passed on for at least a couple of thousand years will exist in many forms, and be surrounded by many and varied ideas by now. Here I’m just going to go with the version that I practise because it works for me! I’m sure that other forms will be good too – I just haven’t tried them. I think it’s also worth mentioning at the outset that not everyone gets something out of them. If you find that they are not for you don’t worry about it. There are so many other types of practice that it is probably best to just move on to something that you find more helpful.  A quic...

  As I hope you can tell from the posts I’ve included in this blog so far, I like brevity and clarity. With the help of a friend, I recently had a go at summarising the first big step of awakening (in the sense of ‘realising enlightenment’ rather than ‘getting up in the morning’, what some refer to as the ‘transformation of consciousness’) in one sentence, and began with, “Being aware of the mind.” We thought that might be a little too brief though, so then we came up with, “Being aware of awareness itself, rather than all that stuff you’re thinking about or looking at“. I’m sure we could play around with this for a long time, but I think this points to the essence of it.  I wanted to do this to help those who are just starting to consider this, so they don’t think that awakening is some deep experience that you have to work on for years just to get a glimpse of. It’s not like that. If you realise that awareness exists and it is independent of all the content of awareness – th...

  This is a short blog post following on from the blog I wrote on 11th February about the kundalini experience I had in 1978 (see https://herethewaking.blogspot.com/2023/02/a-kundalini-experience-while-meditating.html) A few years later, in about 1986 or 1987, I was driving across England and listening to a cassette of music by Beethoven on the car’s audio system while I was driving. If you are under the age of 30 you may need to ask an older person what a cassette was. This cassette included the Leonore overtures from his opera, Fidelio.  I was enjoying the music as I had several times before, but on this occasion, as the music reached part 2 of the Leonore III overture, I found myself again having a kundalini experience, only the second since the initial experience I had in 1978! It was not as intense or as long-lasting as the first two occasions, but it fitted descriptions of kundalini experiences very clearly: A feeling of intense energy gathered at the base of my spine, t...

  One of the useful things I got from spending several decades working in the social sciences was seeing the importance of holding onto theories very lightly and being prepared to let go of one theory in favour of a better one when the data supported it. Although this is a drastic simplification, the process went something like this:     • You study some aspect of the world that you want to understand better.     • If there is currently no adequate theory that helps in understanding that aspect of the world then you develop one.     • From that theory you derive one or more measurable, testable hypotheses.     • You do an experiment to gather data that indicates whether your hypothesis is correct and therefore whether your theory needs changing or can stay as it is, for now… So far this is a brief description of a fairly standard way of doing science, known as the hypothetico-deductive method as described by Karl Popper among others. However,...